Thursday, March 29, 2012

How the Romney Campaign is using the fear of Ron Paul to defeat Rick Santorum

This fascinating, but anonymous report, published by Ron Paul Forums Liberty Forest, offers an insider look at how the Romney-establishment is trying to beat Rick Santorum and use the fear of Ron Paul to do it.

The Report:

Tonight I went to an invitation-only meeting, whose sole purpose was to destroy Ron Paul’s effectiveness in Washington’s Clark County Convention on March 31st.

First, a little back story. It is no secret by now that in other areas of Washington, and probably around the country, the GOP establishment is scrambling to deny Ron Paul any delegate slots. In Washington there is an organized effort to create a “Unity Slate” that consists of Romney, Gingrich and Santorum delegates, and to get supporters of all three candidates to vote as a bloc for this slate of delegates. The primary force behind this scheme is the Romney campaign, and it should be no surprise that they always end up with the lion’s share of delegates listed on the slate.

I can’t spill all the details of how I ended up getting into this thing, nor all the details of the meeting itself, lest any information be easily traceable back to myself. I was there ‘undercover.’ What follows is a brief account of what I saw:

An extremely large number of people filed into a large convention room. The meeting organizers began to speak, one after the other. It was immediately made clear by the organizers that their goal was to block Ron Paul delegates from succeeding at the convention. A speaker rattled off a long list of mostly fabricated grievances against supporters of Ron Paul, calling us liars, backstabbers, and cheats. Then he went on to list the results from recent conventions in other areas of the state. In every case, Ron Paul had walked away with a vast majority of delegate spots, while the other candidates received relatively few. With each result being read, there was an audible gasp of shock and horror from the audience. With every accusation flung at the Ron Paul crowd, there were exclamations of “Oh my…” and a synchronized shaking of old gray heads around the room. Ron Paul supporters send e-mails to each other coaching on how to pretend to be republicans, or how to pretend they go to church. Ron Paul supporters unnecessarily delay conventions with parliamentary tactics for upwards of 14 hours so that supporters of other candidates will leave. Ron Paul supporters make deals and promises, then back-stab everyone. Ron Paul supporters will NOT vote for anyone except Ron Paul. The ultimate conclusion: Ron Paul supporters must be stopped, at all costs. The best way to do it? Rally behind Mitt Romney, who’s already won anyway, and don’t worry: we’ll throw some delegates at the other guys, too.

A Q&A session was opened up. A few people asked confused questions about the agenda. Some people spoke out against those mean old Ron Paul supporters. Some people questioned whether or not this agenda helped Gingrich or Santorum at all. Then, from the side of the room, an older gentleman who had his hand raised was called upon. To paraphrase, he said, “I’m a Ron Paul supporter, and frankly I’m disgusted by this whole thing.” The primary organizer told him to leave, and everyone cheered as he was ejected. I sat in silence as my compatriot left the room with dignity and honor. I wanted to yell at them all myself, go outside and shake the stranger’s hand, but alas, I was incognito and needed to remain that way.

The meeting proceeded. Supporters from each campaign spoke in favor of the plan. Local politicians and GOP bosses spoke in favor of the plan. Reluctantly acknowledged from the back of the room, and given a mere two minutes or so to speak, a volunteer from Rick Santorum’s national campaign spoke fervently to the crowd: This plan is NOT endorsed by the Santorum campaign, he said. Ron Paul supporters are NOT backstabbers and cheats, and he relayed his experiences in other areas of the state where Santorum and Paul delegations had successfully teamed up to block Romney, with Paul supporters fulfilling their end of the bargain to the very end. His protestations were ended swiftly as more vehemently anti-Paul GOP insiders were called upon to herd the Santorum supporters back into the fold...MORE...LINK

The saying goes that generals fight the last war. Obama, and his allies, politically are stuck in the 1960s. Everything for them, is Bull Connor setting police dogs and hoses on peaceful Black civil rights marchers, live on the three networks! But like the Nazi army in late 1942, they seem headed for failure. Not because of the brilliance of their enemies, but because of the fatal but unseen flaws in their own organization.

For the German Army, it was the lack of any real ability to logistically support a mechanized army in the field for any considerable distance. THAT was the reason Adolf Hitler ultimately failed. He inherited a magnificent military machine, whose NCOs to General Staff were superb.

Obama has seemingly fixated on the sad case of a Mestizo man, born to a Peruvian mother, and adopted by a Jewish man in Florida, who shot a 17 year old Black boy in a town near Orlando Florida, in what police ruled self-defense. Latinos are on notice, when they get into conflicts with Blacks, they are “White” (which is to say, automatically guilty). The media is in a 24/7 Trayvon Martin frenzy, with old photos of Martin from age 12-13, not his more recent Facebook photos flashing gang signs, and old photos of George Zimmerman age 20, looking like a fat thug, not a leaner guy in a suit and tie. The media frenzy is to whip up Black violence, for its own sake, to intimidate and create fear among Whites, as emotional payback, and also to create an image of 1965 and Bull Connor. A failed attempt if ever there was one. President Barack Dinkins? Crown Heights?

Yes, that event is coming, somewhere, to a city near you.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail is full of stories about brutal Black criminals. In the case of the prior link, one Tyrone Woodfork, brutally raping and beating to death 86 year old Nancy Strait, and critically injuring her 90 year old husband Bob, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge as a member of the 101st Airborne. Then there is the case the Daily Mail also reported on, two British tourists murdered in Sarasota Florida by a Black thug named Shawn Tyson.

Floating around the internet is the 2009 case of the 15 year old White boy set on fire in Deerfield Beach Florida, and the 13 year old White boy set on fire in Kansas City several weeks ago. Both were set on fire by Black “youths” as the links make clear (photos at the link of the accused). The boy in Florida nearly died, has massive burns, and faces a life with heart and kidney problems, as well as being permanently disfigured...

Long term, Obama and company want riots and violence and cities burning. This he thinks will win him votes, as this has been successful in Chicago for decades. Pay to make the mob go away. Again, with Whites in place, stuck, that just guarantees a fight. Probably as an ultimate back-up plan, Obama wants violence so he can if he loses the election, institute Martial Law and rule by decree. His recent executive order allowing him to seize basically anything including newspapers, radio, TV, and the internet is part of that ultimate back-up plan.

Unlike Bill Clinton, who stole everything that was not nailed down (particularly the corrupt deal with Haiti Teleco involving Joseph Kennedy and Bill Clinton), Obama did not steal wisely. Clinton made sure to involve not just Republicans, but Republican interest groups in corrupt deals. That’s why Bill Clinton did not spend a day in jail, and only lost his law license, not the Presidency. Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama has not kept the good times rolling either, for many in the elites and the people as a whole. As far as corrupt Presidency models go, the Arkansas version was better than the Chicago one.

Obama has made too many enemies: on Wall Street, among energy companies, among utilities, among Silicon Valley, among home builders, among mining companies, among almost everyone but a few favored cronies. That’s the downside of the Chicago Way, you make powerful enemies who know they must destroy you or be destroyed in turn. There is no easy good-time corruption ala the Arkansas model, where everyone is happy.

Ultimately, however, the idea that “evil White racists” are killing Black people is unsustainable even for the Blitzkrieg media. It just isn’t true, and people know it. David Duke lives in a trailer in Mississippi. Louis Farrakhan has a mansion bigger than Oprah’s, and with more goons too. All those threats turn off the Middle Class, White female voters who are the swing and thus the decisive votes in the 2012 elections. It is satisfying, and the default mode for Black politicians and people, to make threats and noise at the White population. For decades it has been rewarded. Going national makes pretty much every White homeowner, renter, and everyone else stuck in place, unable to flee, ready to fight...MORE...LINK-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

Gee, I wonder what all these warped, sicko politicos, the ones who are busy robbing the country blind for their crony capitalist and cony socialist comrades, and inciting religious wars in the Middle East and race wars at home so the American people don't notice their corruption and treachery, have in common?

Oh, that's right: they're all ideological Zionists, in bed with neolib and neocon "intellectual" Jews, who plot out their policy schemes and have engineered this growing American nightmare for the last several decades.

Is it really any surprise that the ethno-fascist Jewish racket, in conflict with humanity for the last 2,000 years, incites chaos and conflict wherever it goes, and has polluted the minds of several generations of U.S. politicians and elites with its latest domestic and international ideological Trojan horse, successor to Communism, called Zionism?

Is it any surprise that a warped, perpetually combative, polarizing people produces warped, combative, perpetually polarizing policies?

Only when Americans are serious about getting rid of the Zionists and putting sane human beings in charge can the problems plaguing this country even begin to get sorted out, but until Americans get serious, I guess they'll just have to shiver in the beds and bite their nails as the Zionist-engineered plague gets closer and closer to their front doors everyday.

Apparently its not just Zionist Jews who are stiff-necked rubes, but millions of American useful idiots hell bent on being directed by them straight over the cliff, as well.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.

The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.

Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.

America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?

The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.

The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.

In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.

This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.

Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens...MORE...LINK

You have to be living under a rock not to notice the deluge of media coverage of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman affair. The accounts I have seen inevitably emphasize Blacks as victims and implicitly at least, the message reaffirms the narrative of Blacks as innocent victims of Whites. This of course flies in the face of data on crime showing that Blacks are much more likely to victimize Whites than the reverse, with the media bending over backwards to prevent any indication that race was a factor. I don’t recall any national media outrage recently when two Black teenagers set fire to a White teenager after dousing him with gasoline, even though they said they did it because he was a “white boy.” This happened only a few weeks ago. Rather than the wall-to-wall coverage seen in the Trayvon Martin case, there was only a brief and fleeting mention in the New York Daily News and no mention at all in the prestigious national media. It doesn’t fit the narrative that the media feasts on and promotes. No angst from Obama; no Justice Department investigation of a possible hate crime.

Indeed, it’s quite common for the media not to identify the race of non-White perpetrators. And somehow Mr. Zimmerman’s Latino background also slips into irrelevance.

Also virtually unmentioned is that Martin and Zimmerman were fighting, with at least one witness emphasizing that Martin had the upper hand just before the fatal shot. Although Zimmerman seems to have been overzealous in his scrutiny of possible criminals in his community, he may indeed have been “standing his ground” once the encounter escalated into violence. Indeed, the Orlando Sentinel reports that the police are sticking with the version that Martin was the aggressor...

Given all this, it will be very interesting to see how this all plays out. The message of the poor, defenseless Black kid buying Skittles is turning into the thug who was suspended because of drug use at his school and who went out of his way to attack Zimmerman and was pounding his head into the concrete.

The main take-home message thus far, however, is the massive media overkill designed to reinforce the fundamental premise of the new dispensation: Non-Whites as victims of evil Whites—perhaps the most pervasive mantra (in Bob Whitaker’s sense) promoted by the mass media...MORE...LINK--------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

Given his scholarship, the author of this article Kevin MacDonald likely believes (correctly) that organized Jewry is the main force behind this generally cultural Marxist, anti-White pathos in mainstream media and much of the establishment.

But opportunistic and demagogic Jews are only part of the problem.

Increasingly, I can see how White greed and money worship has itself sown the seeds for the success of Zionists and Marxists in eroding Western civilization and imposing these multi-cultural dictates. After all, the main pursuit of the vast majority of modern White elites is not Western culture and thought, but rather socioeconomic status and materialism (in America particularly, but increasingly in the entirety of the West as American power and influence has been projected abroad).

And what's the clearest path to monetary gain? Opening the borders and expanding all markets to their maximum capacity. And of course, once the borders are open, some sort of governing paradigm that can smooth out the wrinkles between the races in order order to facilitate stable markets and continually wring the general population for its income becomes necessary. That paradigm is politically correct, multi-cultural materialism and cultural Marxism.

Sure, that paradigm, that glue, could have been the pursuit of Greco-Christian thought and Western philosophy, art and science along with constitutionalism and the rule of law...but for the insatiable bounders aiming for massive riches, vainglory, and megalomaniac self-aggrandizement, where's the profit in that?

What the money-worshipping degenerates and sociopaths were most interested in was creating a massive, mindless marketplace of ignorant consumers and crass materialists who would work and spend and work and spend...nothing more.

Jews, of course, comprise more than their share of greedy and demagogic opportunists on both the left and the right, and more than their share of anti-Western agitators (due to the fact that traditional Western civilization had low tolerance for Jewry's culture of insatiable greed and self-serving, tribal-supremacist ambition and racketeering) but again, they're not the only ones.

It is the kind of Whites who themselves are insatiable, cut throat money-worshippers, crony capitalist and crony socialist gangsters, demagogues, charlatans and opportunists that fall into bed with the Zionists that are at least an equal portion of the problem.

For a long time now I've said, and most firmly believe, that the only way to ever restore Western order and sanity is to completely subsume not only the Zionist and Marxist Jew sociopaths, but the sick, cynical collaborators suckling them in the bedroom and plotting with them in the board rooms and government offices to both their left and their right.

Any creature, of whatever race, that would whore him or herself off to the Judeofascists and their schemes, plots and lies is not a creature whose passing is worth mourning.

Such a creature is the enemy not only of Western civilization, but of the entirety of humanity itself. An abomination.

The question has to be asked: why do modern Whites make up such a disproportionate percentage of such creatures?

In a recent petition at Change.org, Ron Paul supporters say they are “outraged” at the treatment Paul’s candidacy has received from the GOP at the local, state, and national levels, the press blackouts of the candidate, and dirty tricks at the caucuses used against him. Because of this, they are urging fellow Paul supporters not to vote for the eventual Republican candidate if Paul or his son, Kentucky libertarian Senator Rand Paul, isn’t nominated as the vice presidential candidate. Although I agree with the sentiment behind the petition, the GOP will likely not give either Paul a VP nod, and it would probably not appease Paul supporters anyway. So what will Paul supporters do in November?

The petition is absolutely correct, however, when they point out that Paul supports make up about 15-20% of the Republican Party, and GOP hostility to their presence at caucuses and their libertarian leanings is a recipe for disaster if the GOP thinks that they can win the presidency without a significant percentage of their votes. It is hard enough to defeat a sitting president; offering up a candidate that differs only slightly on major issues will make it even tougher.

There has been much speculation about what Ron Paul will do with the significant amount of delegates he will in Tampa. The mainstream media, never prone to hinder gossip, has suggested that Paul has an “alliance” with Romney where Paul will transfer his delegates over to Romney for a multitude of rumored reasons: a VP slot, cabinet position, speaking role at the convention, or influence in the party platform.

But this “alliance” is completely manufactured; the GOP leadership would never allow Ron Paul to be VP and Romney — being philosophically opposed to Paul on nearly every issue — would probably never even give it to Paul anyway. And even if Paul influenced the GOP platform by having them include, say, promises to audit the Federal Reserve, abolish the Sixteenth Amendment, and scale back the American empire, the GOP has a long history of using libertarian and populist rhetoric to acquire votes, only to expand the federal government once in power.

I sympathize heavily with the aforementioned petition’s frustration with Paul’s treatment from the GOP, but the likelihood of Paul being included in the GOP — or having actual influence among the nominee — is virtually zero. Paul supporters are also fundamentally at odds with much of what the GOP stands for, so they will likely not vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Besides, when both parties offer slightly different version of federal interventionism at home and abroad, who exactly is the lesser of two evils? Without Paul in the race, 15-20% of the GOP will probably stay home, vote third party, and once again be unrepresented.

But that could change if Paul decides to do something that the petition doesn’t discuss: run third party. Paul’s home has never been with the Republican Party, the party elite are openly opposed to his ideas and candidacy. The Libertarian Party, which is on the ballot in all 50 states, has their presidential convention in early May and he could drop out of the GOP race by then and run as a Libertarian...MORE...LINK

The U.S. dollar has probably been the closest thing to a true global currency that the world has ever seen. For decades, the use of the U.S. dollar has been absolutely dominant in international trade. This has had tremendous benefits for the U.S. financial system and for U.S. consumers, and it has given the U.S. government tremendous power and influence around the globe. Today, more than 60 percent of all foreign currency reserves in the world are in U.S. dollars. But there are big changes on the horizon. The mainstream media in the United States has been strangely silent about this, but some of the biggest economies on earth have been making agreements with each other to move away from using the U.S. dollar in international trade. There are also some oil producing nations which have begun selling oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, which is a major threat to the petrodollar system which has been in place for nearly four decades. And big international institutions such as the UN and the IMF have even been issuing official reports about the need to move away form the U.S. dollar and toward a new global reserve currency. So the reign of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency is definitely being threatened, and the coming shift in international trade is going to have massive implications for the U.S. economy.

A lot of this is being fueled by China. China has the second largest economy on the face of the earth, and the size of the Chinese economy is projected to pass the size of the U.S. economy by 2016. In fact, one economist is even projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

So China is sitting there and wondering why the U.S. dollar should continue to be so preeminent if the Chinese economy is about to become the number one economy on the planet.

Over the past few years, China and other emerging powers such as Russia have been been quietly making agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar in international trade. The supremacy of the U.S. dollar is not nearly as solid as most Americans believe that it is.

As the U.S. economy continues to fade, it is going to be really hard to argue that the U.S. dollar should continue to function as the primary reserve currency of the world. Things are rapidly changing, and most Americans have no idea where these trends are taking us.

The following are 10 reasons why the reign of the dollar as the world reserve currency is about to come to an end....

#1 China And Japan Are Dumping the U.S. Dollar In Bilateral Trade...

#2 The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) Plan To Start Using Their Own Currencies When Trading With Each Other...

#3 The Russia/China Currency Agreement...

#4 The Growing Use Of Chinese Currency In Africa...

#5 The China/United Arab Emirates Deal...

#6 Iran...

#7 The China/Saudi Arabia Relationship...

#8 The United Nations Has Been Pushing For A New World Reserve Currency...

#9 The IMF Has Been Pushing For A New World Reserve Currency...

#10 Most Of The Rest Of The World Hates The United States...MORE...LINK

The wealth of the super-rich has grown astronomically for the last three decades. But that doesn't mean the rich are without their own troubles, writes Eric Ruder.

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, the persecution of minorities has haunted the "world's greatest democracy." But today, while many forms of discrimination have been put behind us in the U.S., fear and anxiety stalks one of America's last despised minorities--the top 1 percent.

The conditions of their torment are poorly understood by the rest of us, especially the 60 percent of workers who report that they scrape by paycheck to paycheck. As a consequence, the 1 percenters endure their suffering in private, further increasing their sense of social isolation and feelings of self-pity.

But thanks to the work of researchers at Boston College's Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, we have been afforded a peek into the psyche of this fragile group--Americans with fortunes worth at least $25 million.

"Sometimes I think that the only people in this country who worry more about money than the poor are the very wealthy," explains Robert Kenny, a psychologist who helped devise the survey. "They worry about losing it, they worry about how it's invested, they worry about the effect it's going to have. And as the zeroes increase, the dilemmas get bigger."

Those dilemmas are often painful--can we really afford that $3 million yacht? How is the housing crisis affecting the property value of our vacation home in Aspen, Colo.? And how does that compare to the mansion in Palm Springs or the villa in St. Tropez?

In fact, the survey reveals that almost all the respondents are preoccupied with the inadequacy of their vast fortunes. "Most of them still do not consider themselves financially secure," writes the Atlantic's Graeme Wood in "Secret Fears of the Super-Rich." "For that, they say, they would require on average one-quarter more wealth than they currently possess."

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WELCOME TO the delusional world of the super-rich--where too much is never enough, and enough is more wealth than any individual in the history of the world has ever possessed.

Roughly 115,000 households in the U.S. contend with the psychological strain of possessing a $25 million treasure chest. The challenges are obviously daunting, but few realize that the super-rich can't even enjoy the simple pleasures that the rest of us occasionally take comfort in. As Wood explains:

A vast body of psychological evidence shows that the pleasures of consumption wear off through time and depend heavily on one's frame of reference. Most of us, for instance, occasionally spoil ourselves with outbursts of deliberate and perhaps excessive consumption: a fancy spa treatment, dinner at an expensive restaurant, a shopping spree. In the case of the very wealthy, such forms of consumption can become so commonplace as to lose all psychological benefit: constant luxury is, in a sense, no luxury at all.

...The idea that the super-rich should pay more taxes infuriates the wealthy and their apologists. An April 18 editorial in the Wall Street Journal ridiculed the idea that taxing the rich would make a dent in the nation's troubled finances, asserting the "fiscal futility of raising rates on the top 2 percent, or even the top 5 percent or 10 percent, of taxpayers to close the deficit"--even if the tax rate were 100 percent.

The next day, Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs ripped the editorial apart:

The top 10 percent reported $3,856 billion in [adjusted gross income], equal to 46 percent of total reported income in the United States, almost 27 percent of GDP. On that, they paid $721 billion in personal federal income taxes, or an average of 18.7 percent of income. If the remaining 81 percent of income were paid in federal income taxes, the increment in tax revenues would be more than $3.1 trillion, or roughly 21 percent of GDP. The budget deficit would obviously be closed many times over.

The real point is obvious. The money received by the richest households is vast, and higher taxes on the rich will make a major contribution to closing the deficit.

Taxing the rich not only makes financial sense, it's also what the majority of people living in the "world's greatest democracy" want to do. Nearly three-quarters of Americans support raising taxes on those with incomes of more than $250,000 a year, according to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll from mid-April.

So what's the hold up? In the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz provides a simple and compelling explanation: The top 1 percent themselves:

Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent...

It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

Nevertheless, politicians across the political spectrum perpetrate the myth that the rich pay a disproportionate share of taxes in the U.S.

According to tax expert David Cay Johnston, "It's true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government." Once payroll taxes and other federal taxes are taken into account, the burden shifts disproportionately to workers and the poor...MORE...LINK

Small business owners and working people constitute the core of the American electorate. They share the same origins and have far more in common than the major political parties would have them believe. Their shared political, social and family needs are being ignored by both parties, as they are cynically played one against the other. Expressing their discontent as Tea Partiers and Occupiers, they are no longer silent, nor can they be ignored.

A Common Background. Organizations of craftsmen have an ancient origin and evolved into hundreds of specialized guilds in the Middle Ages. These guilds combined labor and small business. Members worked for themselves and trained their own apprentice helpers.

Along with independent farmers and local merchants, skilled craftsmen were the primary employers until the industrial revolution. Industrialization created the need for masses of unskilled workers and the conditions which ultimately compelled their organization.

Success of the earliest industrial strikes depended on local small business owners, who provided the necessary credit and support that allowed workers and their families to survive.

American small businesses and laborers have organized for self protection from the very beginning of the country. The bakery owners of New York City stopped baking in 1741 to protest price fixing by municipal authorities and printers struck in Philadelphia in 1786 for higher wages.

The Progressive Movement in the early 1900s was supported by labor, small businesses, the professional middle class and women activists. They sought to reform every aspect of the political system allowing voters to more directly control their government and to improve the quality of life for their families.

The Division of Labor. A strong labor movement expanded during World War II and the postwar era to reach its peak in 1972, with the organization of almost one third of all public and private workers. These union members were the ground troops of the Democratic Party.

With the comfort and security of higher earnings and benefits, skilled workers moved up to the middle class and many of them and their children started small businesses. At the same time, President Reagan’s war on organized labor began to cut the ties that workers had to their unions.

These factors, combined with Republican cooption of “family values” and religious matters as political issues, has resulted in only about 11% of workers, primarily in the public sector, now represented by unions. Almost 50% of all workers are voting for Republican candidates, often against their own interests.

Small Businesses and Their Workers. Half of all working people in the United States either operate a small business or work in one. Small businesses represent 99.7% of all U.S. private employers and have, since 1989, created 93.5% of all net new jobs in the country. (National Small Business Association)

Almost three quarters of all U.S. business firms have no payroll. In other words, most are operated by self-employed persons, who may or may not have other sources of income. Of the almost six million firms with employees, 78% employ fewer than 10. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Given these realities, there is very little effective contact between small business owners and labor unions; however, there is a very high degree of shared interests between most small business owners and workers in America.

Suffering. Small business owners and workers share the anxiety of economic uncertainty, including the difficulty or impossibility of obtaining health insurance, saving for retirement and providing education, food and shelter for their families.

Small business employers and their employees travel to work over the same unrepaired roads, and they send their children to the same rundown schools that suffer from a lack of teachers, funding and direction. Their homes have negative value, they live in the same environment, drink the same polluted water and breath the same poisonous air. Their food supply is dangerous, and they all pay more than $4 a gallon for gasoline.

Failure of Representation. Whether they vote democratic or republican, the interests, aspirations and needs of workers and small business owners are ignored by their political parties, both of which are indebted to and controlled by large corporations and the wealthy elite.

With its decision in Citizens United, the Supreme Court reversed two hundred years of progress toward a democracy for all of the People. The U.S. Government no longer represents the voters who elect it, including the workers and small business owners of every political party.

Two thirds of small business owners revealed in a recent poll that they have been hurt by Citizens United, and 88% viewed money as playing a negative role in politics. (Lake Research)

The rallying cry last heard during the American Revolution, “no taxation without representation,” is once again on the lips of American workers and small business owners...MORE...LINK

The military dictatorship behind President Obama is preparing to wage a total war against Iran. The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order of March 16, 2012, is a further indication of this suppressed reality.

This executive order gives the office of the Presidency the power to impose Martial Law and confiscate all national resources to extend the life of the banksters’ parasitic war machine that hijacked America in 1913. This anti-American war machine survives on state terror. It would’ve shrunk considerably if 9/11 hadn’t been committed by the Bush administration and Mossad.

We must remember that America was put in a state of national emergency on September 14, 2001 by then President George W. Bush. So President Obama is merely following the plan. He is not responsible for Martial Law and the state of emergency. We knew Martial Law was coming to America and the West all along because of the unforgivable nature of the false flag September 11 events.

If a criminal clique within the world’s most powerful government can murder its own people in cold blood with the assistance of a foreign government and suppress that fact in the global media, then it should not be surprising to anyone that the same criminal clique is committed to destroying all obstacles in its passionate pursuit of supremacy in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the world.

A total Western war against Iran was inevitable once 9/11 happened. There was no going back once the ultimate red line was crossed by the American and Israeli governments on that beautiful morning.

So far, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community have constrained their power vis-à-vis Iran, and chosen to squeeze their enemy in a step by step process before delivering their most lethal blows. They have used economic, information, and cyber warfare with Israel’s help to weaken Iran’s technological capabilities, blacken its image to isolate it from the international community, and stop the flow of Iranian oil to the world market.

But the strategy to disconnect Iran economically and politically from the region and the world has not worked because it is strategically impossible. Numerous polls in the Middle East have shown that most people regard the United States and Israel as greater threats to the security of the region than Iran. Iran’s social and political capital is visible in Shiite and Sunni communities across the region.

And it not just in the Middle East where Iran is more popular and more respected than the United States and Israel. As Middle East expert Juan Cole wrote in late February, “Despite American assertions that Iran is “internationally isolated,” it turns out that the boycott of that country is a solidly Northern Hemisphere phenomenon and only partially successful even there. The US-led sanctions on and boycott of Iran have largely been rejected in Africa,-Asia and Latin America.”

On Wednesday, March 21, Chinese official Hong Lei reasserted China’s economic relationship to Iran by saying that, “China legally imports oil from Iran through normal channels in a reasonable and fair manner.”

In this stage of the war against Iran, Israel has taken the lead in order to take pressure off of the Obama administration in a topsy-turvy election year. President Obama does not want to be seen by the international community as aggressive towards Iran because such a transparent stance would discredit his image even further...MORE...LINK-------------------------

"If a criminal clique within the world’s most powerful government can murder its own people in cold blood with the assistance of a foreign government and suppress that fact in the global media, then it should not be surprising to anyone that the same criminal clique is committed to destroying all obstacles in its passionate pursuit of supremacy in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the world. A total Western war against Iran was inevitable once 9/11 happened."

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Chris Moore comments:

The key to stopping this insane Globalist totalitarian agenda is pressuring the Diaspora Zionist Jews. Once they realize they're the ones who are being played by the Israeli Zionist Jews and the Anglo-fascist Globalists, they'll be pressured towards calling off the attack dogs. They need to know they were too clever by half with their blatant Israel lobby fifth column, and will be the first to go under the bus when this starts getting ugly.

They already have a huge target on their backs that reads "Israel Firsters."

And the Israeli Jews want them squeezed into the state of Israel anyway for their own incestuous ethnocentric and ideological religious purposes.

And the Anglo-fascist snakes (in addition to being early enemies of America, the inbred Brit Royalist "elites," with their Jew-like "chosen" conceit -- including those who have re-infiltrated America like English ivy -- are long time enemies of Western civilization, as well) won't really care if the Diaspora Jews go under the bus.

(1) A reader reminded me of this yesterday and it’s really quite something: in July, 2009, NBC‘s Chuck Todd went on Morning Joe to defend President Obama’s decision to shield all Bush officials from prosecution for torture, arguing that because Bush got his lawyers to say he could torture, it was legal. I interviewed/debated Todd a couple of days later about those views, but before I did, I wrote a reply to the argument he made on television. When doing so, I tried to think of the most extreme tyrannical and lawless power possible which a President could hypothetically assert, in order to reveal the invalidity of Todd’s reasoning, and this is what I wrote:

I’d like to ask Chuck Todd: if Bush had John Yoo write a memo opining that it was perfectly legal for Bush to deploy hit squads within the U.S. to assassinate American citizens without any due process, would it be wrong to investigate and prosecute that, too, on the ground that everyone had permission slips from a DOJ lawyer and that’s just what lawyers do?

The current President has, of course, obtained his own DOJ permission slip to assassinate American citizens without due process. Since that permission slip is too secret for us to see, we do not know whether the authorized assassination power is confined to foreign soil or extends to the U.S., although once one embraces the Bush-Cheney-Yoo theory that the entire world is a “battlefield,” there is no coherent way to limit those asserted powers to foreign soil. In any event, the real point here is that our government has become so radical and warped that it outstrips one’s ability to create absurd hypothetical powers to test the validity of a principle: before you blink your eyes, you find that your hypothetical has become reality...

There are a couple of articles that have appeared in the last week or so about the willingness of many Democrats to passively accept or even actively cheer for policies under President Obama that they vehemently condemned (or would have condemned) under President Bush: this from Politico, and this from Tim Carney at The Washington Examiner. Back in June, 2009, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert — once an ardent admirer of President Obama — wrote a column lambasting his civil liberties record, and this was the first sentence in Herbert’s column: “Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.” At the time, I truly did not fathom how that principle — which really should just be an unstated axiom — would not only come to be so controversial but routinely violated and ignored...MORE...LINK-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

I'm not exactly sure why Greenwald or any other authentic liberal expected anything else out of Obama or his inner circle. After all, way back in 2008 during the presidential campaign, Chuck Schumer publicly bragged to a Florida synagogue that Obama was in the pocket of left-Zionist Jews.

And c'mon, does Greenwald really pretend not to know the extent to which left-Zionist Jews have blatantly tightened their stranglehold over the Democratic Party over the course of the last 20 or 30 years?

At this point, I really have to wonder if both mainstream liberals and conservatives actually enjoy being raped by Zionist Jews, or if they just like the fact that "helping the Jews" via self-serving crony capitalism (on the right) or crony socialism (on the left) provides them a kind of self-deceiving moral cover for plundering and raping future generations of Americans.

Whatever the case, the idea that the establishment Democrats or Republicans don't know exactly what's going on in this country and how complicit they themselves are in Zionism's continually ratcheting plans for economic enslavement and totalitarian persecution of future generations of Americans has simply become unbelievable.

They know exactly what's going on, but simply lack the moral and ethical fiber, and even basic human decency, to compromise their self-enriching racket, or own up to their own sickness.

Deep down, I think they know they have sold out the country, sold their own souls, and (probably correctly) believe there can never be redemption for the demonic creature that stares back at them in the mirror every morning with bloodshot eyes, hence they will continue to suck the crack pipe to its last resin.

But for the life of me, I can't figure out why anyone who is not directly benefiting from the racket can be so stupid as to go to bat for one team or the other. I mean, if you're going to sell your soul to the Zionists, you should at least get paid.

I guess it goes to show the extent to which this country has been so thoroughly enslaved and brainwashed socially, economically, intellectually and spiritually by the Pharisees and their ideological disease -- so many of the lemmings who are marching towards the cliff are gathering up their own children and shoving them to the front of the line, and they don't even know why they're doing it.

Monday, March 19, 2012

(By Chris Moore) -- Central government-worshipping liberals have disdain for what they sneer at as "conspiracy theory" -- for them, anything outside of the left-right establishment narrative droning on inside the Beltway, which itself has become a mere echo chamber inhabited by corrupted politicians who live in a fantasy world completely outside the reality of the vast majority of Americans.

If some perspective, theory or idea hasn't bounced around the Beltway echo chamber for at least five years, then it's dismissed as "conspiracy theory" by these pompous, arrogant statist liberals.

They love to adopt a grandiose pose as open minded progressives and champions of "the little guy" (unlike those anti-neocon, anti-neolib, anti-Zionist Jew, anti-Globalist, knuckle-dragger “conspiracy theorists,") but when it comes right down to it, they're the worst kind of enemies of the People, because they take the votes of the anti-war, anti-crony government, economic justice and civil libertarian masses, and promptly sit on their hands and do absolutely nothing to reform what is self-evidently a corrupt system.

Indeed, because there is no intellectual or moral substance or fiber to politically correct statist liberalism whatsoever, and because those in its orbit are generally nothing but poseurs, and useful idiots for the more vigorous neolibs (who themselves are mere lackeys and shills in bed with the neocons), what is the point in even engaging these moral and intellectual frauds in discussion?

Until brainwashed liberals who are not part of the hopelessly corrupted Beltway machine grow up and realize Beltway statist liberalism has become a mere tool of Zionism and Globalism (whoops, are those “conspiracy theories”?) it’s really difficult to have much of a conversation. It's like trying to talk politics with a rube who just fell off the hay wagon, or some inner city gang-banger who never set foot outside of the ghetto.

"Duh...what's a neocon? Ain't that some kind of racist conspiracy theory?"

The truth is, "conspiracy theory" (for lack of a better term) is actually an increasingly popular political orientation, as former liberals who aren't haplessly brainwashed and former conservatives who aren't hopelessly brain dead realize they’ve been hoodwinked, manipulated, looted and whored by the “mainstream” non-conspiracy theorists (ie. the establishment neolibs and neocons and their satellite dupes to both the left and the right).

It’s generally right-libertarian, and evolving into what almost might be called a political movement. And liberals with an open mind might be interested to know that its left-wing corollary is the Occupy movement.

What both seem to have in common is that they are generally anti-Zionist and anti-Globalist.

I look forward to the day when they might unite, crush the increasingly cohesive and totalitarian crony capitalist and crony socialist “center” that is currently occupying Washington and robbing the country blind, and throw the entire, hopelessly corrupt Beltway lot out on its evil ear.

And make no mistake, "evil" is exactly what these Beltway parasites are -- and what central government-worshipping statist liberals who refuse to open their eyes to the corrupt, warlike, neo-totalitarian Beltway machine inevitably become.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Many Republicans are hesitant to align with Sen. John McCain’s aggressive stances on Afghanistan and Syria.

Facing a public that’s become increasingly war weary after a decade of conflict, most Republicans have not backed McCain’s call for action in Syria.

The GOP has been more split on Afghanistan, with GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney supporting McCain’s opposition to President Obama’s withdrawal plans for Afghanistan.

Yet the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said this week he supports the administration’s plans for Afghanistan, and he is hardly alone.

“On this issue, I’m not sure there is necessarily a clear consensus, and I think people are in different places,” Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the third-ranking Senate Republican.

“There are folks who are war weary. It’s been a long campaign, but obviously there are a lot of us who realize we’ve invested heavily in blood and treasure there.

“It’s a process a lot of our guys are going through in terms of trying to figure out what’s the right way forward,” Thune said.

McCain, the Republican nominee for president in 2008, has been one of President Obama’s harshest critics on foreign policy, blasting his planned drawdown of the surge forces from Afghanistan and for its inaction in Syria.

McCain’s call for action in foreign policy is nothing new, as he was a leading advocate of the surge in Iraq in 2007 and for intervening in Libya last year.

“He’s consistently out front pulling the GOP caucus along, and pushing them into taking more bolder military action,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said of McCain.

In the case of the surge in Iraq, Republicans followed McCain, the party’s standard-bearer in the 2008 election. But they haven’t been as quick to follow him on Libya last year, and on Syria and Afghanistan this year.

This extends to the presidential race, where Newt Gingrich this week questioned whether the mission in Afghanistan was “doable,” and Rick Santorum suggested faster withdrawal should be a possibility.

Eaglen said McCain’s call for staying on the current course in Afghanistan “is an increasingly solitary position in this town, not just among members but also among pundits and movement leaders.”

McCain said in an interview with The Hill that he does not see a rift in his party over Afghanistan and Syria. McCain said he doesn’t try to “twist arms” in his party, but will always articulate his views and do what he thinks is right...MORE...LINK

The massacre of 16 Afghan civilians was a dagger to the U.S.-led coalition's hearts and minds campaign, which was already in decline after 10 years of war.

Coalition forces will still help bolster the Afghan government and security forces in coming years, but Afghans increasingly believe America's only mission is to leave as soon as it can.

Even President Hamid Karzai, the long-standing U.S. partner in Afghanistan, has turned toxic. He told the U.S. to pull its troops out of Afghan villages and said it's fine with him if international forces wrap up their combat mission early.

Afghans already were worried about what will happen when international troops hand over the lead combat role to Afghan forces next year. Then, a rapid-fire succession of events shattered their trust in America, hastening an end to the effort to win over the Afghan population.

In January, a video purportedly showing American Marines laughing and urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters surfaced on the Web. In February, Muslim holy books were burned at a U.S. base north of Kabul in what President Barack Obama said was a terrible mistake. A week ago, a U.S. soldier allegedly went on a shooting rampage in two villages in Kandahar province, killing nine children, four men and three women and burning some of their bodies...

The recent events have further complicated efforts to negotiate a U.S.-Afghanistan partnership document that will outline America's presence in the country after 2014.

"They do not respect women, children, the clerics. They don't respect the culture of the Afghans," said Nasurullah Sadiqizada, an Afghan lawmaker from Day Kundi province in central Afghanistan. "Is it good for Afghanistan to sign a strategic partnership with these kinds of things happening to our people?"

Nick Whitney, former head of the European Union's European Defense Agency, said that incidents such as the shootings and the burning the Qurans undermine any pretense that NATO is in Afghanistan because it wants to help the population.

"These incidents just underline the fact that the game is up for NATO," said Whitney, a senior policy fellow at the Paris-based European Council on Foreign Relations. "It's been a lost cause for a number of years. In their heart of hearts, elites across Europe have know this for a long time."

Faith in the U.S. has broken down so much, that residents _ especially in the south _ have started believing that American troops are looking for excuses to leave before the end of 2014.

"Living during the NATO war against the Taliban has already been hard," said Abdul Qayum Khan, who runs a store that sells refrigerators and home electronics in Kandahar. "Now, knowing that Americans are finding ways to make their run and leave us in chaos, it is worse.

"Government officials are already shifting their families abroad and settling there, which shows that they already know what's about to come. It's getting dangerous out here and we can sense it too."...MORE...LINK

The Army staff sergeant suspected of killing 16 unarmed Afghan civilians during a rampage through two isolated villages Sunday has been identified as a Lake Tapps man who joined the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sgt. Robert Bales, an Army sniper from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, was on his fourth combat tour when he is alleged to have wandered off on his own from a small outpost to commit an atrocity that has strained U.S.-Afghan relations and saddened his colleagues.

There is little indication of a motive behind the slaughter, which included the shooting deaths of nine children. Some corpses were burned.

And the fact that Bales is a seasoned combat veteran and noncommissioned officer of the sort the Army has relied on through 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan only deepens the mystery.

Bales, 38, was flown Friday from Kuwait to the high-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he is being held pending charges.

His neighbors, friends and comrades-in-arms have expressed grief and disbelief at the accusations.

"He was a great noncommissioned officer," one of Bales' former commanding officers told The Seattle Times on Friday. "When I found out who the name was, I nearly fell off my chair and I had a good cry."

The officer, who commanded Bales during intense fighting in Iraq, where the suspect served a total of 37 months, asked that his name not be used because Bales has not been identified formally by the Army as the suspect...

The New York Times has quoted senior military officials as saying Bales had been drinking against regulations before the killings.

Browne, his attorney, said the soldier has "never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He's never said anything antagonistic about Middle Eastern individuals."

"He's generally been very mild-mannered," Browne said.

The former commanding officer who spoke to The Times was among several sources who said Bales distinguished himself in Iraq at the bloody and one-sided Battle of Zarqa, also known as the Battle of Najaf, in January 2007. About 170 Stryker troops confronted a well-armed, fortified force of Shiite fighters after a U.S. helicopter was downed.

Over two days, some 250 enemy fighters were killed and 80 others wounded in a frightening display of firepower. The Americans didn't suffer a single casualty.

Afterward, the soldiers turned around and provided medical assistance and humanitarian aid to the survivors and their families.

"I've never been more proud to be a part of this unit than that day," Bales said in a 2009 article published about the battle in the Northwest Guardian, a Lewis-McChord publication. "For the simple fact that we discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us.

"I think that's the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy," he said...

Browne, the attorney, has described Bales as a "highly decorated" soldier who had been injured twice in combat, including a head injury in the crash of a Stryker vehicle and another incident in which he said Bales lost a portion of a foot — injuries that typically would result in a Purple Heart decoration.

However, Army records released Friday show numerous commendations for Bales but not a Purple Heart.

The shock over the killings is amplified by Bales' status as a senior and experienced noncommissioned officer, long considered the backbone of the military...MORE...LINK-------------------------

No more wars for Israel, Zionism and Globalism.

As for the rich, overfed, 1% slobs and their wiry political lackeys who think the U.S. Military is their play thing, let them move to Israel and pick up a rifle if they want a clash of civilizations.

They won't, because they're cowards, hypocrites and self-serving snakes...a true nest of vipers that Jesus of Nazareth and many others down through the course of Western civilization warned the world about.

Why has America unleashed these snakes upon the world? Because its political class is hopelessly corrupt, and in need of radical reform at whatever cost it takes.-- C.M.

There are rules of proper etiquette in the Washington think tank culture, the most annoying of which is to suppress all emotion for a given topic in the interest of appearing aloof and dispassionate, ever-reaching for the inner Mr. Spock in some narcissistic attempt to look more scholarly than everyone else. Apparently another “must,” particularly in the national security think tank sphere, is never to invoke President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 speech in which he ominously gives name to the Military Industrial Complex (MIC).

As the 34th President said:

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Think tank maven Robert Kagan, who has been sloshing about at the military trough so long he wouldn’t know a MIC from a St. Paddy’s Day reveler, waved off a brief mention of the foreboding Eisenhower speech at a panel discussion of his new book and how national security issues are affecting the presidential election at the swanky neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Thursday.

“Among the many things I didn’t like about Eisenhower that speech was one of them — I don’t like that speech and I did not know what he was talking about,” Kagan flippantly retorted to a soft-spoken questioner who apparently hadn’t gotten the rule book that says there will be no uncomfortable questions that include the words (in no certain order or combination), “propaganda,” “military industrial complex,” or “Eisenhower.” Case closed. Next question?

Kagan, who hails from the aggressively establishment Brookings Institution, was on hand to collect think-tanky accolades for his new tome, not surprisingly entitled, The World America Made, which is about, in part, maintaining U.S hegemony, or as Kagan likes to calls it, “American World Power” throughout the globe. Kagan of course knows what Eisenhower was talking about, but to people in Washington’s NatSec hive, criticizing the MIC is like throwing mother’s milk out the kitchen window. The only way the U.S can exercise this global power Kagan is so breathlessly selling is to have the war machine running balls to the wall 24/7 — every institution, every technology, every human cog a symbol of power to be used and exported for both message and might. As Kagan wrote in his ponderous New Republic essay in January, “Preserving the present world order requires constant American leadership and constant American commitment.”

As the 1% reap 93 percent of the income gains from the recovery, we’re rapidly returning to pre-New Deal levels of inequality.

--- There was a brief debate focused on the following question: would the gains of the economy continue to accrue to the top 1% once the recovery started, or would they have a weak post-recession showing in terms of raw income growth as well as income share of the economy? The top 1% had a rough Great Recession. They absorbed 50 percent of the income losses, and their share of income dropped from 23.5 percent to 18.1 percent. Was this a new state of affairs, or would the 1% bounce back in 2010?

We finally have the estimated data for 2010 by income percentile, and it turns out that the top 1% had a fantastic year. The data is in the World Top Income Database, as well as Emmanuel Saez’s updated “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States” (as well as the excel spreadsheet on his webpage). Timothy Noah has a first set of responses here. The takeaway quote from Saez is, “the top 1% captured 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery.”

First off, let’s get some absolute numbers here. Here is income by important percentiles, as well as the change from 2009-2010. I include the change with and without capital gains to make it clear that this is a phenomenon both in and independent of a strong stock market (click through for larger image):

X

The bottom 90 percent of Americans lost $127, the bottom 99 percent of Americans gained $80, and the top 1% gained $105,637. The bottom 99 percent is net positive for the year due to around $125 in average capital gains. They can take comfort in efforts by the right to set the capital gains tax to 0 percent, which would have netted them an additional couple dozen bucks...MORE...LINK

A Seattle defense attorney hired to help represent a soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians says the possibility that his client suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by injuries and multiple combat deployments will be foremost among the issues his team will explore.

John Henry Browne said he spoke by telephone to the 38-year-old staff sergeant, an Army sniper, whose demeanor he described as "shocked" and "distant."

"He certainly wasn't agitated," said Browne, who wouldn't identify the soldier. "I don't think he knows a lot of the facts that are being alleged."

He said his client — who is from Joint Base Lewis-McChord — is a decorated soldier who had lost part of a foot in combat in Iraq, and had suffered a head injury during another Iraq tour when his Stryker vehicle crashed after a roadside bomb detonated nearby.

Those injuries and "other reasons" had led the soldier to believe he was not going to be sent to Afghanistan after three previous deployments in Iraq.

Dr. Richard Adler, a Seattle forensic psychiatrist who specializes in PTSD, has been brought in by the defense team. Adler said Thursday that the soldier apparently had undergone a screening for a "concussive head injury" at Madigan Army Medical Center before his most recent deployment in December. Browne said the staff sergeant had sought some counseling, but he did not have the details.

"He did not want to deploy," Browne said in an interview. "In fact he was told he was not going to go. Then, really almost overnight, that changed."

The soldier is suspected of going on a shooting rampage in villages near his base in southern Afghanistan early Sunday, killing nine children and seven other civilians and then burning some of their bodies. The shooting, which followed a controversial Quran-burning incident involving U.S. soldiers, has outraged Afghan officials.

Browne said there was other evidence the soldier may have been under stress: A fellow soldier in his unit had reportedly lost a leg in combat the day before the civilian shootings...MORE...LINK

...The idea that Romney is going to offer the vice-presidential nomination to Ron – or his son, Rand, freshly elected to the Senate from Kentucky – is a pipe dream. The party leadership would never allow it, the convention might well rebel (as a way of expressing conservative discontent with the candidate), and – in my opinion – Romney would never offer it in the first place.

As for changes in the party platform [.pdf] – so what? No one pays attention to these documents, not even the candidates, who are not bound by them. A cabinet position would be a paltry prize indeed, and accepting such a deal – handing the nomination to Romney in exchange for, say, making Nick Gillespie the drug czar – or, more likely, making Rand Paul Transportation Secretary – would be a humiliating end to what started out as a noble crusade.

In each case, the price the Paul campaign would have to pay for such ill-gotten “gains” would be so high that the result would be the effective end of the Paulian movement: that’s because the price would be supporting the nominee, i.e. Mitt Romney, with a personal endorsement from Ron. I, for one, can’t imagine him doing that: whenever he’s asked if he would consider supporting the eventual nominee, Paul gives every indication that the answer is no. He explains why in this interview, in which he emphasizes the Republicans’ warmongering as a major reason not to endorse any of them.

Viewed objectively, and with the long-range goals of the Paulians in mind, there is only one road forward for the movement: the third party route.

Running on a third party ticket would give Paul access to the votes of his natural constituency: the young independents disgusted with both parties who yearn for real change – i.e. a revolution – in Washington. It would give the Old Right remnant in the GOP, which Paul has reawakened from its long sleep, a place to go in November, while also making room for independents, antiwar voters, civil libertarians, disillusioned Obamaites, and other constituencies unlikely to be caught dead voting in a Republican primary.

Polls indicate Paul would get anywhere from 18 percent to 21 percent running as a third party candidate, and the percentage seem to be climbing as the actual election draws nearer. These same polls indicate he would draw two-thirds of his votes from the Republican column, but I don’t think these “drill-down” analyses hold much water: what they leave out is non-voters, new voters, and – most important of all – future events. If the US starts bombing Iran before election day, or, say, we have another economic meltdown, as we did in the winter of 2008, then all bets are off – and the prospect of a Paul victory becomes more than mere wishful thinking.

A Paul third party candidacy would not only open up a prospect that, right now, seems highly unlikely if not impossible – i.e. Ron Paul sitting in the Oval Office – it would also place significant constraints on the other candidates, including President Obama. Faced only with a warmongering Republican, Obama can pretty much do whatever he likes when it comes to provoking, sanctioning, and threatening Iran: after all, antiwar voters have nowhere else to go. With Paul in the race, however, Obama is going to have to be very careful not to lose his left-ish antiwar constituency, which has so far stuck with him as the lesser to the two evils. If and when Obama makes his move against Iran, Paul’s third party campaign will be right there, scarfing up votes from the President’s disillusioned and angry former supporters.

Indeed, the ultimate effect of a Paulian third party ticket could well be preventing the outbreak of a major war in the Middle East. This, it seems to me, is a factor the Paul campaign is going to have to weigh in the balance as it considers its options. In terms of the Paulians’ own principles – especially their characteristic opposition to wars of aggression on moral grounds – this is a powerful argument for launching a third party campaign...MORE...LINK-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

Ron Paul should definitely keep the door open to the possibility of running independently of the GOP, because once he officially cuts any deal and throws in his lot with the establishment candidate, both he and the Ron Paul Army will be taken for granted.

With the specter of him breaking away and going rogue hanging over the Republicans, he will at the very least be able to squeeze them for the absolute best deal available, and if that's not good enough, he can go anyway.

Frankly, I don't know about the logistics of getting him on the ballot in all 50 states if he did go rogue, but he's got a very sophisticated machine of his own that I'm sure could come up with something.

The other smart principle behind keeping open the possibility of running independently is that Barack Obama is reportedly being "blackmailed" by the Israelis to start a war against Iran well before the election. This would throw everything up in the air, and theoretically even enable Ron Paul to waltz right into the White House when the Dems lose half their voters to a candidate like Paul as a consequence.

So in summary, the specter of an independent Ron Paul candidacy keeps both the militant neocon wing of the GOP and the corrupt Democrat establishment honest, at least until final election season, and after that the imperative of not doing something too radical (inertia) kicks in.

...Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact...MORE...LINK

Friday, March 09, 2012

Denouncing Republican "bluster" about war with Iran, President Obama went on the offensive Tuesday:

"Those who are … beating the drums of war should explain clearly to the American people what they think the costs and benefits would be."

The president had in mind such remarks as those Newt Gingrich delivered to the Israeli lobby AIPAC that same day: "The red line is now … because the Iranians are deepening their commitment to nuclear weapons" — an assertion the Joint Chiefs and U.S. intelligence agencies say is blatantly false.

They insist: Iran has not made the decision to build a bomb.

Perhaps the president was referring to Mitt Romney’s pledge to that same cheering throng to "station multiple carriers and warships at Iran’s door" and deny Tehran even "the capacity to make a bomb."

But if "the capacity to make a bomb" means knowledge of how to build one and an ability to enrich uranium to bomb-grade, should they decide to do so, Iran already has that.

Does Mitt want war now?

Perhaps the president had in mind John McCain’s call for U.S. air strikes on Syria, an act of war rejected even by GOP Speaker John Boehner as "premature," since the "situation in Syria is pretty complicated."

Have the Republican uber-hawks learned nothing from the war for which they beat the drums 10 years ago?

Then they told us Saddam Hussein was implicated in 9/11, that he had chemical weapons, that if we didn’t invade his country we could expect anthrax attacks by Iraqi crop-dusters up and down our East Coast.

Those who asked for proof Saddam was a mortal threat were dismissed by Condi Rice: "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

The price of our heeding that bluster? Some 4,500 American dead, 35,000 wounded, $1 trillion sunk, 100,000 Iraqi dead, half a million widows and orphans.

The fruits of our victory? A Shia-dominated Iraq descending into sectarian and civil war.

The GOP’s political reward for marching us up to Baghdad?

Loss of both houses of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, when the antiwar Obama crushed the war hawk McCain.

Today’s GOP front-runners — Newt, Mitt and Rick Santorum — all clearly believe that a warlike stance toward Iran will appeal to the evangelical base and to Jewish voters who went for Obama by 57 points in 2008.

But they are rolling the dice with a war-weary America.

Ron Paul, whose youth vote the party needs and who receives the largest number of contributions from the military, has split with them on Iran.

The president, says Paul, is "closer to my position than the other candidates, because what the other Republicans are saying is reckless."...MORE...LINK

If liberals are good for anything, it is being outraged about all the wrong things. If one were to measure the amount of media debate in the past week, the conclusion might be that a law student being called a slut was the worst thing happening in the nation and the world. Liberals can’t be bothered to protest against war, even if they did so during the Bush administration, or indefinite detention, or targeted killings, or drone strikes, or the destruction of Libya or Somalia.

Rush Limbaugh, a man who would have to have been invented if he didn’t exist, called law student Sandra Fluke, a “slut” and a “whore” after she testified in favor of religious institutions being required to include contraception in their health care plans.

The liberals then lost their collective minds. There was no limit to their ire. One would have thought that Rush Limbaugh was killing Afghan children with drones, or torturing black Libyans, or planning to attack Iran. Of course, Limbaugh has absolutely no power to do any of those things. He is a celebrity, a media personality who advocates the right wing point of view. He is a sexist and a racist, but he has no power to take anyone’s life. That is Barack Obama‘s job.

Obama, like all American presidents, is among the slickest politicians of all time, but he is certainly no fool. He knew that Limbaugh handed him a political gift and he ran with it. Obama personally telephoned the aggrieved young woman while his liberal sycophants demanded that advertisers drop Limbaugh’s program. Republicans joined in the beat down and admonished the erstwhile standard bearer for his offensive language. Limbaugh was political toast, and Obama was king.

“Obama knew that Limbaugh handed him a political gift and he ran with it.”

What could happen if these same people used as much energy opposing policies that literally kill thousands of people around the world? Quite a lot would change, but they don’t take actions against people in power because they don’t really care about what they do.

At the same time that these angry and outraged citizens were claiming victory against a radio personality they ought to be ignoring, the attorney general of the United States publicly claimed that the president of the United States has the right to kill at will whenever he feels like it...MORE...LINK-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

The Globalists and Zionists running this country ultimately turn everyone into a whore. But it takes a particularly defective and nihilistic essence to enjoy it, as do so many of the "elites" of the Worst Generation.

If these scumballs think they are going to get any sympathy in their dottage, they better think again. Whether they're liberal fascists or neocons, whores deserve the gutter, and will get it.

***

There are very few classical liberals left in America, almost all are now liberal fascist neolibs or statist liberals who have gravitated to fascism out of the realization that global dollar hegemony is all that is propping up the massive spending programs, and have made their deal with the devil to sustain dollar hegemony at the point of a gun in order to maintain the lifestyle to which they have become accustom.

Vladimir Putin wasn’t the only one with tears in his eyes as he exulted in his presidential election victory and shouted “Glory to Russia!” The entire American punditocracy, to say nothing of the Brits, responded as one with accusations the election had been fixed, confidently predicting a “crackdown” on “dissent” as the Russian leader resumed the office he had never really left.

Yet there is very little to these claims of fraud. Of course, in every election ever held anywhere there have been “irregularities,” such as are commonplace in our very own Chicago. There is some evidence the Russian parliamentary elections were somewhat less than honest – the 99 percent pro-Putin vote in Chechnya, of all places, was particularly suspect – although no one has gone so far as to say Putin’s United Russia party actually lost.

The reality is that Putin is immensely popular in Russia, a fact the English-speaking media only admits with great reluctance. The “dissidents,” who are fawned over by Western journalists, are viewed by Russia’s vast-albeit-silent majority as a tiny faction of professional discontents with dubious motives. Putin has characterized them as professionals in the pay of Washington and London, a charge given credence by some hilarious video of a British diplomat and Russian “democracy activists” who wound up between a rock and a hard place.

Even before the OSCE report on the presidential poll was issued, the chief of the mission, one Tonio Picula, averred:

“The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia. There was no real competition and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt.”

Senor Picula may be unfamiliar with the details of American electoral history, but was the outcome of every US presidential election from 1936-44 ever in any doubt? “No real competition?” Has Picula looked at the Republican presidential field lately? “Abuse of government resources”? Oh please, spare us the sanctimony: what incumbent hasn’t utilized the power and prestige of incumbency to win reelection? Western politicians hand out goodies to their supporters, and then bus them to the polls on election day: why should we expect a Russian election to be any different? We’re told pro-Putin voters were bussed from polling station to polling station, engaging in “carousel voting,” and yet the Russian election seems relatively clean compared to how the process was conducted in the Iowa and Maine GOP primaries.

This charge of a lack of competition is ironic, given the system we have here in the United States, which effectively ensconces two state-supported and state-subsidized parties, giving them a monopoly on the political process at the state and federal levels. These two parties are, in legal terms, effectively extensions of the state, and they have managed to not only preserve but reinforce their privileged status. If only the OSCE and the “human rights” crowd turned their attention Westward, say to California, where an “top-two” system has effectively banned third parties from the ballot...MORE...LINK

PHOENIX (FutureDataBank.com)- CNN, CNN breaking news, and Anderson Cooper have been caught red handed creating staged CNN war room scenarios regarding Syria and other stories that are simply manufactured Hollywood news designed to dupe the ignorant masses of America and the world into believing war propaganda. Damning footage has emerged of ‘Syria Danny’ – the dubious “activist” who appears on mainstream news each and every week begging for a US or Israeli military invasion – in which he apparently coordinates gunfire and explosions to be staged during his interview with CNN.

Syria Danny preparing his report for CNN is told by camerman: "Tell them they are falling down, and we're taking bodies from underneath them". Hip boots please! This is a staged "report" and only proves that CNN is manufactured news. (Watch the clip below)...

Danny "the activist" is heard saying: "Well let the gunfire sound then," right before asking someone off camera, "Did you tell him to get the gunfire ready?" Then explosions are heard directly after but Danny doesn't seem to be startled by it. To coincide with the Fake CNN Anderson Cooper interview, the camera man and Danny are clearly appearing to be coordinating props, staged explosions, and gunfire for those watching. Now, despite all of the violent explosions and seemingly dangerous location Danny is in he seems to be perfectly calm with absolutely not a worry in the world! Danny has appeared on many television shows and his stories of war torn Syria seem to change each time he appears.

This is not the first time CNN has been caught manufacturing news. Charles Jaco was the CNN reporter famous for covering the 1990 Persian Gulf War. The following video shows the stage set he was on, and he was clowning around with fellow CNN staff. The Saudi Arabian hotel in the background were fake palm trees, and a blue wall in a studio!